Yaguang Wei, PhD

Yaguang Wei, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Climate Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research mainly focuses on health impacts of air pollution and climate change, particularly on cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, neurological disorders, and overall mortality, by leveraging large datasets and advanced epidemiologic and statistical methods. Some examples of his current work include: exploring synergistic effects of air pollution and temperature variability on cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, exploring relative toxicities of air pollution components in cancer development and progression, and examining the mortality effect of wildfire smoke and modifications by other environmental factors. Although not exclusively, much of his work is conducted within large cohorts including Medicare, SEER-Medicare, Medicaid, and State Inpatient Databases.
Dr. Wei is also interested in methodological questions related to confounding control and exposure measurement error, both for more robust health effect estimates. This has involved model selection for semiparametric time series models, estimation of generalized propensity score for continuous exposures, and exposure measurement error and its impacts on health effect estimates.
The third aspect of his work involves exposure assessment. Dr. Wei has been generating exposure estimates of air pollution and weather variables at neighborhood scales for the whole US, and making these data publicly available through NASA to foster collective efforts to tackle complex environmental health challenges.